A new optimal design strategy for monohull vessels is proposed. The goal of the proposed procedure isto make monohulls competitive with their multihull counterparts. The resulting designs, thus, wouldcombine the advantages of high speed vessels with those of simpler monohull vessels. The proposedstrategy proposes a new re-formulation of hull optimization problem objective and uses a new class ofArtificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to achieve it. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation isused to provide the necessary data for ANN training. The advantage of the used ANN over classicalones is that it adopts a one-shot lagrangian-like training procedure. The proposed design strategy isproven to be effective through several CFD-validated design examples